Blood Sprite is Badly Designed

[noe]

This is really the only enemy I've encountered so far, and I'm pretty sure I've encountered almost all of them, that feels distinctly unfair after several fights with them. Blood Sprite has a high amount of health, high constant damage, has guaranteed progressive damage with no counterplay nor makes any personal sacrifice to gain it, and requires damage to constantly be dispersed on summoned enemies just to avoid taking high damage from a second constant source.

If you don't knock out the summoned enemies, they deal massive constant damage. If you do knock out the summoned enemies, Blood Sprite will eventually get even more massive damage. And the summoned enemies continue to spawn, continuously requiring you to divert damage onto them against a main enemy that already has high health on their own; with it eventually being possible for Blood Sprite to have massive damage and have their side filled with summoned allies also dealing massive damage simultaneously. Meanwhile Blood Sprite never stops attacking or takes any turns off to do anything else but attack.

Nearly every other fight like this in the game that I can think of either has a special mechanic that players must juggle to avoid the enemy getting too much of an advantage, or the enemy has to make some kind of sacrifice to buff themselves or debuff the player which gives players time to breath. There's none of that here, no trade offs or strategy or anything at all to adapt to; the solution to this problem is just be overpowered enough to brute force it because there's no tactical way to handle this fight. Regardless of which way you approach it, Blood Sprite still just keeps getting stronger while making no sacrifices of their own to do so.

Which has been the case everytime I've fought them. If I have just an average build that was previously working just fine against every other threat, Blood Sprite completely out scales me. If I have an overpowered build that can mash through all their summons while simultaneously maintaining high block due to absurd energy generation, then I don't get artificially forced to restart all over again.

I'm not sure how much of a priority balancing even is while this game is utterly riddled with obvious glitches but at the moment Blood Sprite just completely stands out to me as the only abjectly unfair and badly designed fight in the game. Although the rainbow yak seems pretty bad too. Actually the rainbow yak is identical to Blood Sprite. Repetitiously summons enemies while punishing you for attacking them and punishing you for not attacking them, with no real counterplay or mechanics that the player can work with.

[Endorphin Parametric]

Yes, brute force works against these enemies, but there are many other strats. By coincidence I just finished a run in which I defeated both, and so, a detailed reply...

First, ensure you have a way of damaging multiple enemies with one card. I find this essential to most builds. Even if you never meet Blood Sprite you will encounter other groups of multiple enemies. So I always grab such cards when they come up, and then prioritise buffing them with gems.

Socket gems that multiply attacks into cards that otherwise only target one foe. Jagged Jewel is great in a big-hitting card. Shard of Hunting works very well, because you can target a back row enemy and kill a spawn in the first row as a bonus. While Meteor Shard might be the best solution, being a Legendary I wouldn't expect to see it.

Third, use Allies, since these can clear up little spawns in the front, all on their own, while you focus on the master. Against the Yak they work too, since you concentrate damage on the mother and ignore the babies who will eat your deck.

Finally, a balanced approach with strong defense can work well. Take you time to clear the bloody spawns while you whittle away the Blood Sprite.

That's a lot of approaches to consider... and they all work.

Sorocco has the most cards to deal with this threat, and they aren't even rare: Impact, Fire Breath, Barrage, Whirlwind. Plus there are combo cards that both attack and defend... quite useful for the slow-and-steady tactic.

Seifer has good options. Buff Frenzy with a damage bonus and it can clear more than one summon. Brimstone Fireburst and Spinning Blade hit more than one enemy. The new Kobold Tactics is great for weenies. Plus there's all the allies, including some with AOE.

Sharra can usually manage on pure damage with buffed Power, as she is designed. Pierce, Lightning Draw, Slice & Dice... many attacks per turn... lots of options.

Aurora relies on the gem approach but has one of the best cards for this, Equilibrium. Hailstorm + the new Scissors treasure is crazy... 64 distributed damage. I got this in my first game under the new version and could hardly believe it.

To win a run at all, you will by necessity need to build into one of or more of these strategies. So it's not a matter of building just to defeat Blood Spawn (that would be a problem). Rather, any good deck should be able to handle this annoying enemy.

Good luck!

[noe]

Originally posted by Endorphin Parametric:

All of your suggestions are entirely dependent on random chance as it's random chance whether players get multi-hitting cards, specific gems or multiple high damage dealing allies at all. It's completely possible to have a strong deck that does not majorly capitalize on any of these things, as I have experienced firsthand. If players are forced to deliberately build towards one of three unspoken deck types which may not even be possible all because two random enemies in the game will stomp any deck that isn't one of these three then that's bad design.

I've won ten runs of epilogue so far without major struggle using a variety of builds that just came about on their own as the run progressed. And like I mentioned, multiple times now I've had builds that were completely functional against every other threat in the game yet were utterly outscaled all just by Blood Sprite. So the part where you say "To win a run at all, you will by necessity need to build into one of or more of these strategies. So it's not a matter of building just to defeat Blood Spawn" is blatantly false and also means you completely ignored the part of my initial post that debunked it.

And before you say "Well at the higher difficulties" no, Blood Sprite has been a problem throughout all the difficulties, anytime I've had any build that wasn't abjectly overpowered. So now you're telling me I have to deliberately restrict my gameplay all just to maybe hopefully deal with this one badly designed enemy.

So even by your own admission this is bad design, as the fact that you need to try and give me advice on how to explicitly build my decks in an entirely random chance driven game all just to make two enemies playable is exactly the kind of inconsistency I was trying to highlight in my post.

Just about every enemy in the game is designed to have mechanics or behaviours that can be responded to using certain gameplay choices in the moment; Blood Sprite and Rainbow Yak requiring certain overarching cards to be playable is not consistent or fair especially in a game where all the resources players find are totally random. And it's doubly bad design to have a game with so much emphasis on player choice force you to build your decks in a certain narrow way just to not get outscaled by two random enemies in a roster of dozens.

This is the only reply I'm making in this thread, this was already a waste of time to have to explain.